‘You will get through it;’ North Bay residents reflect on 5 years after devastating Wine Country wildfires

SANTA ROSA — Saturday marks the five-year anniversary of the Wine Country Fires, a disaster that claimed the lives of 44 people, destroyed more than 6,000 homes, and is largely seen as the first major fire incident in a five-year period that produced multiple fire catastrophes across California.

The October 2017 Northern California wildfires in Napa, Lake, Sonoma, Mendocino, Butte, and Solano counties affected the lives of countless people. Even some of those who didn’t lose their homes ended up seeing their lives change course because of the disaster.

“My mother passed away earlier that same year and I had a box of some of her old tea cups and things,” said Santa Rosa Coffey Park neighborhood resident Pamela Van Halsema. “A remarkable neighbor, whose house did not burn, every house around hers burned, she hosted these parties where we could come and bring that broken China and make mosaics out of them.”

Van Halsema does not have many keepsakes or artifacts from before the fire and said she doesn’t think too much about it. Even anniversaries are for moving forward.

“They are milestones,” she said ahead of the fifth anniversary. “They are markers and you figure out, just like a birthday, have we proceeded? What has changed? Sometimes it’s about memories, and sometimes it’s about growth.”

What has changed is her neighborhood, and she doesn’t just mean the new homes.

“Largely, a lot of us didn’t know each other before the fire,” she said of her neighbors. “So what we were able to do is build new relationships and help one another.”

Coffey Park accounted for about 1,300 of the more than 6,000 homes that were lost. Five years later, vacant lots are almost hard to find. While rebuilding wasn’t practical for everyone, the vast majority of homes have been replaced, through varying degrees of struggle.

“These people signed with the folks who ended up in jail for fraud, and lost a lot of money,” she said, pointing to one home. “Had to find another builder. So there’s a story behind each one of these houses.”

“For me, the fire was just one more of the many things that made it difficult to continue doing business in that area,” explained resident Lisa Laplace. “At least the business that I do.”

Born and raised in Northern California, Laplace spent 38 years in Napa County. The night of October 8th, the Nuns Fire came racing down a ridgeline right towards her horse stables.

“I still can honestly say I feel the emotion,” Laplace said. “The smell and the wind, the sound.”

The horses were saved, but the fire, the continuing risk, the power shut-offs that disabled her well water – she said it all combined to be the final piece of her decision to leave. She spoke with KPIX from Perrin, Texas.

“Again, I was lucky, I didn’t lose [everything],” she said.”But it was very traumatic for me, having to make those decisions when you first interviewed me. To have to tell the lady that we could not load her horses, and not knowing whether they were going to just cook there. Those are not memories that I would never want anyone else to ever have to experience. My heart goes out to all of those that have stuck with it there. I hope there are some good solutions, especially coming up on this anniversary.”

“Like this, we put this around the air conditioning unit,” Van Halsema said of the wood lattice in her backyard. “I’m like, ‘this is like kindling.’ So we’re going to take this off. We want to replace that.”

Even in her own new home, Van Halsema now works to promote fire resilience, moving forward by taking what she has learned and experienced in the five years and passing it along.

“Anyone who is still going through that,” Van Halsema says of other fire victims. “We know we’ve had the Walbridge fire, the Kincaid fire, the Glass Fire. Don’t give up. Take breaks, Have grace with one another. You will get through it, but it is hard and I want to acknowledge that hard work that everyone’s doing. It is long and hard.”